Art and politics and politics and art: the 19th Biennale Sydney 2014

The Belgo Geordie casts his shadow on Art.... 

Now I can be accused of talking shite from time to time, an' fair call an all. But given the discussion leading into the 2014 Sydney Biennale took on a whiff of politics, I sat up and took notice. Coming out of an election with a right wing landslide, the first people still not recognised and Clive Palmer driving to the Parliament in his Rolls Royce, you might think the role of politics was no longer under the tea-cosy but about to hit the ground running in places where the chip papers from Occupy once stained the concrete pavements of Sydney's streets.

Now young Belgo Geordie was a bit of a dab hand at art when he was a nipper. More pitman painter than yon John Constable. As an old Belgo Geordie I've walked the boards and disturbed the dust of many galleries and peered and squinted meself to a standstill. There's a bald patch on the side of me head from a fair bit of scratching'. So I think this gives me the right t' say me piece. But this pontification is only my opinion, subjective, influenced by those forces that shaped me. What you imagine you desire indeed. The religious sisters have a lot to answer for.  I understood this was about "space-theoretic typology involving spatial and perspectival features." I heard the installations were so many" theatres for the staging of arguments."  Belgo Geordie's meat and drink, the meaningless but heated misuse of words to make a point and bore people blind. I was prepared to go out and do my bit in the Great War of Art.

Stand back...there is nothing going on here

Love playin' wall shadow..me rabbit

This installation (on left) was bloody clever. Carriageworks is a place where trains were put together in those far off days when there was a thing called work. Hundreds of people laboured in-between these brick walls, countless trades, tools down, smokos and on pay days; crisp new notes and some coin, delivered in a small sealed envelope. So it was right canny to find it gutted and showing not a sign of labour having gone on here. Not even the lingering smell of oil and solder disturbed this big echoing silent vault; this shrine representing the stolen dreams of working men and women made redundant by the selling off and closing down of industry. Their pie and chip farts relegated, like the over brewed tea needing six sugars; to posterity or industrial theme parks like this...More banks anyone?

Belgo Geordie
looking at a wall
while some bugger's left their TV on

An hour later. none the wiser

Little house in the car park

In a darkened room, I met someone who knew summat about struggle. Sure he had seriously deranged eyes and a disturbing ability to melt into shades of black and grey! He was a four sided quest for self analysis and paralysed by something outside of his control.

We both agreed having an endless loop of Tom Cruise running towards you was a bridge too far for fragile, budding artistic (of the installation kind) sensibilities. I tipped my hat to him as I left my pardner to carry on his lonely discourse on spatial and visual angst, summit about never finding your tail no matter how hard you chased.


Then there was a work that from a distance looked like the big top without tent and not much of a circus. But it was interesting in a post-consumerist and 'who pulled the plug, and is anyone left to care' kind of way. Of course it might have been a promo for the Football World Cup. A massive, brilliant protest at the wadge of cash that could have been spent on meaningless infrastructure like schools, hospitals, public transport and the like. Phish! Bloody artists eh!

What impressed itself on me is the number of installations requiring a telephone directory sized manual to explain the artist's...well whatever it was that moved 'em to do what they did based on a history of previous installations and other concepts of modern society going down the nettie in a hand cart...or not. Now I can read a book and I have been known from time to time to say summit clever. But even with reading glasses and turning my head sideways and looking intellectually puzzled, I was left all too often thinking "is that so". Like I was a product leaving Woolies just haven' me bar code read and my cultural bank savings emptied of a wad of hard earned cultural knowledge. Was I fed? Was I bugger!

Cheeseburger in paradise installation

I found a collective of cinemas. One showing something about New York. The Great Gatsby without content. In another I went in mid film; it were about two guys living and working around Chernobyl. It was slow train wreck sort of stuff. They knew the radiation was high, it might be killing them, but being young alpha males they were shrugging it off with an ample supply of spirits and living the good life (as they saw it) preferring the eerie abandoned, quarantined areas where life and ghosts hang together. But when do docos become art and art become nothing much? Some of the other features shown were exercises in the ability to sit still and not fidget that Belgo Geordie hasn't done since little 'uns school.

Aye I dragged myself back up to the surface and the lights of Redfern where it occurred to me Carriageworks had been almost spookily empty. Art 1 the People 0.

And the people's choice, the winner is....The first piece that made an impression on me was this installation outside Redfern Railway Station. So I set up me deck chair, loosened me laces and braces, lit me pipe and had a good think about what the artist was trying to say. From their self portrait I noted they had joost the one finger and eye brows in need of a meeting with some clippers.
It was the first overt political statement, the sluggish blood thickened in my tired veins. Like treacle in a bucket. Across town to the Art Gallery of New South Wales,  or NSWAG where another part of the Biennale was hiding out amongst the other exhibitions. Such as "The Treasures From Paul Keatings Pockets".

Other chaps on the way to Biennale

Best use of drinkin' straws Form 3 exhibit

Finding the Biennale stuff was a bit of a challenge, somewhere down where the toilets are and had I looked up....but like the man in the photograph, I was too busy admiring the layout of the flooring, which is why 

I wandered my way into another exhibition and needed an aspirin, a sit down and some dark glasses.

                                       

It was near lunch time and being a vegetarian I found Rosa's kitchen...

Then thought mabe not...Then a whole row of people had taken their kit off and indulged in a bit of body art. There was a representation of Geordie Man:

At the Gallowgate end an' joist gone three up against Sunderland

But Deborah Kelly's work "No Human Being Is illegal" was collaborative and multi-cultural. Politics through the participatory process. Life sized photographs of a range of bodies with and without collage made for interesting viewing. Likewise the audio/visual room at MCA was both soothing and engaging.

So was it worth it? Did politics make an appearance. I would say not. Sure there were canny installations and moments where it were a pleasure to partake. But not enough. And although I went to three different venues at different times, there were bugger all folk there taking it in. The most political action I encountered at the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) was early on a Saturday morning when staff with nothing better to do than be petty demonstrated rules are to be obeyed without question. One skate-boarding across a vast empty gallery to tell me I had to either carry my back-pack in my hand or strap it to my front. The back pack was small and almost empty. I looked at the few middle class women with their four wheel drive pushchairs and shoulder bags the size of small wardrobes and thought Why? And how this reflect on the spirit of the Biennale? Galleries, places where you behave in a certain way? The cultural churches where we all know and are reminded of our place in the scheme of things. I missed Cockatoo Island and the refugee art project but I also missed the spirit of activism in what I saw.

I reflected on Art and politics and recent events such as the Afghani woman artist in Khandahar, Malina Suliman. Her art work carries a death sentence from those patrons of the art the Taliban but she keeps taking out her spray cans and continues to promote the plight of women, girls and anyone who is not Taliban in Afghanistan. See Patrick Aboud's 3 minute plus documentary "Tagging the Taliban". http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/07/03/feed-tagging-taliban recently there was the bill posting by Peter Drew in Adelaide (June 2014) of drawings and art works made by refugees in the limbo of bridging visas. This brings the discussion to passer's by. And as I walk around Sydney's Inner West, I continue to see a rich diversity of graffiti and slogans that show politics and art are instant, breathing and more evident than the Biennale was able to show.

Just to call something political and provide discourse on ideas on why this is so, does not make it so. Needs fire in the belly and to be aimed at something needing to be exposed/changed-such as the Intervention, such as the Lucky Country for some, our Australia Day mentality which is often another form of colonisation and White Australia for Anglo immigrants like myself. As such it would have been good to see more activism and guerrilla art take possession of this event and God knows there is enough raw material in Australia to create a powerful and effective cultural exchange of ideas, images and dialogue. 

Belgo Geordie does not work for, consult or own shares or receive funding from any multinational, political party or organisation that owns him.

In Fading Light filum review - them clever folk at Amber

The death of fishing in North Shields; 

A modern morality tale 

In Fading Light (1989)

A film by Amber Collective and starring Dave Hill, Sammy Johnson, Joana Ripley, Joe Caffrey, a fishing boat and of course, North Shields

Now Amber collective is something to admire. Film-makers/writers/photographers documenting communities across the north east of England and in doing so capturing poignant moments of a region's decline. "In Fading Light" is a story set in the twilight of the great North Sea fishing industry. It was a time where many local North Shields families lived off the fish bought in and unloaded on the quayside. My family, the younger males remember being hit up by the bawdy and deeply funny herring girls. Others had at some time packed kippers or cleaned fish. One uncle had a business making the wooden packing boxes. And men in the family, if they didn't do some time in the mines (for their bond money or because of their age) went out on boats before joining the navy (Royal and Merchant). It is in our blood.

This film, which you can order from Amber on DVD, is an unsung hero of British film. Tom Hadaway's script is in parts deeply funny, prejudiced (fishing boats were male domains and in this story it is a woman who sneaks aboard) and tragic in its outcome. It is broad with Geordie and the better for it. It is also a testimony to a way of film making which is rare. Small crew, dedicated actors and a fishing boat that appears to have sailed its own course more often than not. Most of the action is set on an anchor trawler fishing the North Sea; home port of North Shields. At core is the relationship between daughter and her estranged father (Dave Hill as trawler skipper). But holding equal position is or was the working life of the North Shields quayside and the disintegrating British/local fishing industry. 

The actors learned to sail the trawler and to fish supported by the local fishermen. In doing so, meaningful relationships were formed. It is a film and story that is rewarding and heart breaking.  And then there is the long commitment by the film-makers and collective to the community. It is reflected in the genuine open hearted way of engaging with the community in making this film and the response of local people enjoying being bit actors for this, my cousin one. And Dave Hill is a joy to watch as were the majority of the cast. More than wussy method acting, these boys and girl (and film crew) went out and filmed in a full throated North Sea gale/storm. There is humour in the recollections of the actors who as they went out to film to get storm footage, the hardened fishermen and boats were heading into the quayside at a fast clip seeking shelter and sit out the storm. Bloody actors eh? 

My DVD copy has a great documentary on the making of this film and shows how another north eastern industry was lost. Seeing the fishermen in the doco saying there are no fish left to harvest in the North Sea was sobering. Their admission it was as much from their own greed than all due to market forces. But they also note it was the dredging with huge nets which came and sucked the life out of the sea, the sea-bed has barely recovered from this pillage.

The last time I was in Shields in 2011 (visiting from Australia)-the quay was almost empty of fishing boats. Now North Shields has 'apartments' and lifestyle industry and there is no longer the unloading of boxes of fish, the shriek of gulls, the stink of fish and guts, the rattling of chains, nor the sight of nets drying along the jetties. This film and "North Shields Stories" remain records of a life which has now passed on and by. I feel poorer for its loss.

All photographs used on this page are from the Amber Films Collective.